Friday, March 01, 2013

Human Rights - India's Budget Targets Women


India’s government just released a new budget that included increased spending to help improve safety for women and a bank only for women. Where some people are happy about this new revision, others are displeased with the fact that these revisions do not do much to actually help the women in India. The Finance Minister, Mr. Chidambaram has set aside 971 billion rupees (18 billion dollars) for the “gender budget”, which reflects the total spending on programs to benefit women. The government will also contribute 10 billion rupees to a fund to provide better security and safety for women, called “Nirbhaya”.  Some women’s rights activists are pleased with the government’s attempt to ensure women’s rights. However, there are many more women’s rights groups who are displeased with the government’s attempt and say that it was just a “grandstanding gesture” rather than a serious measure. They also said the budget didn’t go far enough into how to help women and other things they were going to implement to ensure women’s safety.
Where it is a great idea to have a budget just for women and all things that have to do with women, it does nothing to help protect the women from violent acts when they go out in public. All the budget does I help with the aftermath of what happened to the woman. Another thing, having a separate bank that only deals with women and only give loans to women is nice and everything but the government should be pushing for all banks being equal in giving to all people. This sets up their society to have gender segregation, which it has enough of already. If they want anything to change in India they are going to need to pass laws that punish the offender of the women and that punish people for discriminatory acts against women.


http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/indias-budget-targets-women/


Concetta Katz
3/1/13 - 1:48pm
Sociology 202-01 

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